In an effort to complete my Del Toro education, I had my first viewing of GDT's first English-Language film Mimic. Mimic is the follow up to Del Toro's Spanish-Language debut Cronos, which used similar themes of insects, evolution and mankind trying to get the best of nature. Where Cronos's small scale and genre flourishes work to its advantage, Mimic feels like a studio film obsessed with (and ruined by) adherence to convention.
The film starts strongly with the introduction of a romantically involved entomologist couple, an autistic boy and a pistachio chewing Josh Brolin involved in a plot where evolved super-bugs risk taking over New York. The opening is filled with little character notes (like a Chinese cop translating a hysterical old woman's ramblings) and beautiful set designs (a long hallway filled with quarantined children in bed) that have come to be Del Toro's trademarks.
As the movie builds towards a resolution, however, it trades out these interesting sets and characters for more generic and unlikeable 90s stock. You have the bad-attitude bucktooth children, the punk rock water sanitation worker (an early Norman Reedus role) a generic Italian shoeshiner (Giancarlo Giannini channeling Super Mario), a "had enough of this shit" cop and the short-tempered piano-playing bug-detective husband walking through poorly lit sewers and tunnels in an effort to blow up all the bugs and kill the remaining fertile male.
Overall I found Mimic to be a very poor movie by a director showing a lot of potential. The scares never land and the interesting set up is completely wasted, but the potential was clearly there early GDT. I consider Mimic his worst film for this reason, just beaten out by the languishing Crimson Peak.
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